where is your country on the democracy index and what do you think about it

@CadyRocks said in #57:

> It helps reduce prison populations in a country that has an incredible rate of incarceration. This was part of a larger bill aimed at reducing prison time for low-level non-violent offenses, and the adjustment of the petty theft rate was part of that. It was very much not the focus, but people jumped on it, because Americans are consistently outraged when any kind of crime doesn't result in life-ruining consequences.

It's all fun and games until it's your store being robbed! :) Sounds good when it's not us being impacted, so we support it.

@Noflaps said in #60:
> When criminals are at large, they are free to steal again.

So this is, in fact, a demand for more incarceration, and putting more people behind bars for theft.

What should the line be, in your eyes, where shoplifting becomes a crime worth dedicating serious police resources to? At what point is petty theft so un-petty that it's reasonable, just, and cost-effective to imprison the perpetrators? You seem to think $400 isn't low enough; at what point should we label someone a criminal and throw them in a hole?

> Let us not, as a society, pretend that stealing even 400 dollars is safely to be treated like "no big deal,"

When the entity you're stealing from has a net worth in the tens of billions and has already budgeted for shrinkage, I think it's extremely fair to treat stealing $400 from them as "no big deal". They probably throw away more goods than that on a daily basis. It's not even a rounding error.

If that $400 dollars in goods is the difference between a shitty Christmas and a good Christmas... I'm not gonna judge.

You're making the mistake of morally conflating stealing $400 from a person and stealing $400 from a massive globe-spanning legal entity that typically isn't even going to bother following up on the theft because, as stated, it's a rounding error.

@greenteakitten said in #61:
> It's all fun and games until it's your store being robbed!

Same question to you.

What should the line be, in your eyes, where shoplifting becomes a crime worth dedicating serious police resources to? At what point is petty theft so un-petty that it's reasonable, just, and cost-effective to imprison the perpetrators? At what dollar value should we label someone a criminal and throw them in a hole?

One consequence of treating petty theft as a serious problem is that we end up spending resources locking petty thieves in prison, and then have to deal with all the knock-on effects of locking petty thieves in prison. There is a moral and financial cost to this - spending time in prison can make it real hard to find a job, as just one example. Felony charges can lock people into a cycle of poverty where the only way out is more crime. Prosecuting petty theft as a felony has real, serious costs. Do you care about those costs?

Words endlessly flow but various kernels of truth remain ignored and undisputed.

So I will repeat.

Crime is a choice. Most poor people do not steal. It is not "no big deal." It hurts innocents. It hurts those who try honestly. Directly or eventually, it hurts others who do not deserve the pain or additional burden.

The better question is -- how much theft from those who work or purchase honestly are we willing to tolerate to protect those who cross the line and harm others voluntarily, and simply hope not to get caught? For critics of consequences, I ask: aren't those who do not choose to cause harm worthy of sympathy? Because they are real, too.

Car jackers and store robbers are not Robin Hood. They are stealing for selfish reasons, and in the long term they are not stealing merely from the rich. Even if a large company takes the first hit, that hit will be passed along, inevitably, because math isn't a fantasy. So crime, sooner or later, raises the burden on ordinary people. People who do not themselves cross the line but try instead to live their lives honestly and with effort.

If something is stolen in significant amounts, others will eventually pay more for that something. Even the honest poor will have to pay more, and they do.

We must choose the sort of society we wish to live within. In the long run, does one really help the most people by making it less costly to harm others voluntarily?

I think a lot of good people are getting sick of living with crime. My sympathy is with everyone, but it is more with those who do not choose to harm others, and simply do the best they can.

It really isn't that complicated. Why do many politicians now try to pretend that it is?

#62:
> When the entity you're stealing from has a net worth in the tens of billions

And what about when they don’t? What about small businesses? What about *most* businesses? The majority aren’t like the one you describe. Your example is unrealistic and unfair; you can’t base policy on a fringe case. I’m no Kantian, but you’re a long way from endorsing actions that could be universalized. Your ethics don’t scale well.

> If that $400 dollars in goods is the difference between a shitty Christmas and a good Christmas... I'm not gonna judge.

What if everyone stole their Christmas gifts? What if stores all had to close during the holidays, for that reason? . . . You’re assuming (1) all businesses that suffer such losses are large corporations, and (2) only a handful of people would ever steal anything. Neither assumption is warranted. (Certainly not if the law is lax.)

Maybe you should start your own business, and see how the real world actually works. (I.e., pull your head out of — you get the picture.) I used to work in retail, and can say from experience that your armchair philosophy is a lot of empty hot air. Where’s the incentive to sell anything? If business owners don’t have some security, people usually don’t start businesses. They certainly don’t keep them.

@Noflaps said in #64:
> Crime is a choice.

Crime is usually a choice. (If you are homeless, your very existence is often criminalized, so good luck not breaking any laws.)

That said, crime is a choice consistently affected by one's surroundings. Poverty consistently drives up crime, as people become more desperate and simultaneously more jaded with a system that does not work for them. It's just not as simple as "criminals steal, good people don't". Adler

> The better question is -- how much theft from those who work or purchase honestly are we willing to tolerate to protect those who cross the line and harm others voluntarily, and simply hope not to get caught?

We're not just talking about "not tolerating" theft here. We're talking about *punishing* it. Unless I've badly misunderstood you, you specifically want to see more people thrown in jails and prisons for shoplifting. You want to see more cases of shoplifting prosecuted as felonies.

This is not a morally neutral stance! A felony conviction causes *immense* harm to those convicted, and prisons aren't cheap! This kind of response makes sense when talking about rapists or murderers, but... shoplifters?

It ties back to where this discussion started in the first place - the US has an absurdly large prison population, in no small part because of attitudes like this, where any amount of suffering for those who are "criminals" can be justified if it prevents any amount of suffering for "good people". It is the mindset that tells us that under no circumstances can we release low-risk inmates from prison due to a deadly pandemic. It's the mindset that tells us that ripping families apart and keeping children in cages is justified because "they broke the law". It's the mindset that tells us that it's fine for anyone convicted of a felony (a category you want more cases of shoplifting to fall under) to permanently lose their right to vote. And people wonder why the US is seen as a failing democracy when a whopping 10% of black voters in Florida are not able to vote.

So one more time.

What should the line be, in your eyes, where shoplifting becomes a crime worth dedicating serious police resources to? At what point is petty theft so un-petty that it's reasonable, just, and cost-effective to imprison the perpetrators? At what dollar value should we label someone a criminal and throw them in a hole, permanently revoke some of their rights, and make the rest of their life significantly harder?

Hell, let's make it personal. I regularly take small five-finger discounts at the grocery chain that ends up with a significant portion of my paycheck each month. How far do you want to go to "not tolerate" that?

This is the cost you are refusing to acknowledge. I really want you to think about it, and ask yourself, "Is it worth it?" I don't think it is, and neither did the CA voters when they passed Proposition 47 in 2014 as a ballot initiative. And, like... it's okay if you say, "yes, it is worth it". If you genuinely weigh the pros and cons and come down on the side of more incarceration... well, I'll think that's morally abhorrent, but it will at least be an answer. What bothers me is, you seem unwilling to acknowledge that there is a cost to begin with. You're not accepting the tradeoff, you're writing it off altogether.

(P.S. We have very different views of large corporations, you and I. I don't think it's a productive line of argument to go down, but I do have to giggle at referring to major box stores as "people who work honestly", because they're not people at all, they're corporations. Any honest work being done there is being done by workers who are chronically underpaid and often the victims of wage theft - a form of theft that is rarely prosecuted but absolutely dwarfs all other forms of theft.)

(P.PS. If you really want to further your understanding about how we think about "criminals", think for a moment how this "criminals"/"good people" dynamic plays out when a society has been trained to see a certain kind of person as inherently suspect based on their skin color, and what purpose this might serve given that context.)

Who should bear the large cost. Those who do not deliberately hurt others, or those who do?

Most crimes are not committed by the homeless. Indeed, any attempt to imply that crime is caused mostly by the homeless seems quite unfair to the homeless.

And even the homeless have resources they can choose to use, in most places, although those resources may be getting overwhelmed right about now, as a consequence of other policy choices that are well-intentioned but perhaps not very clear-sighted.

I once took in a homeless friend, and he certainly wasn't looking to break the law. To the contrary. And he eventually got back on his feet and moved on quite successfully. He remained positive and hard working, as he had always seemed to be.

Another homeless friend of mine, who lived for years on the street, did not want help and oddly, though consistently, did not avail himself often of the resources that the community made available. He wasn't remotely dishonest or dangerous. He had, I think, merely a wild, perhaps irrational, love for his own independence, and simply did not like any sort of structure or organization imposed upon him. He was a wonderful chess player, and one of the most interesting people I have ever known.

Neither of those men choose crime. If they had done so, I would of course have had some sympathy.

But to merely stay alive, one would not need to steal $100 dollars' worth of goods, let alone $900. One would not need to steal jewelry or expensive running shoes, or designer items, or liquor.

Let us by all means have sympathy for those who are young and lack judgment and make mistakes. But let us also have sympathy for the multitude who chooses not to harm others and simply to do the best they can; see clearly that their burdens are only increased by crime.

"Tough love" is a well-known expression for a reason, and it probably draw sneers from many who think that it comes only from hate and not from love. But none of us, including me, should be too sure that we have things figured out. And we have to get it right. Do recent trends feel like they are helping or hurting? Is life right now feeling safer and more fair than it did a few years ago? We all need to reflect upon that. And I will try to remain open-minded and willing to listen to other opinions. I hope that is true for all.

May 2024 be a good fresh start for all of us. Happy New Year, to all.

@Noflaps said in #67:
> Who should bear the large cost. Those who do not deliberately hurt others, or those who do?

I don't think a felony conviction is a proportionate response to petty theft. Part of my argument is that the harm doesn't line up - the harm from petty theft is so, so much less than the harm from a felony conviction and time in prison.

This argument proves too much. You could make this argument to justify any punishment for any crime. If someone proposed removing the hands of petty theives, this argument would be just as valid in defense of that punishment. It implies that we don't care about the victims of theft if we don't punish theft as harshly as possible.

Petty theft is bad. I don't reckon this is a controversial statement. But locking someone in a cage for months or years and permanently branding them as a "criminal" seems a lot worse to me, even if they chose to commit petty theft.

> Most crimes are not committed by the homeless. Indeed, any attempt to imply that crime is caused mostly by the homeless seems quite unfair to the homeless.

Criminalized, not criminal. This is something I think is really important to understand, and why I'll keep recommending "The Punishment Bureaucracy", published in the Yale Law Review, because it's written by experts and is extremely eye-opening about the realities of policing in America.

But back to the unhoused. I'm not saying they all go steal stuff, I'm saying that being homeless is, in and of itself, effectively a crime in many places. Cops will consistently raid homeless encampments and steal or destroy things with only the flimsiest justifications. It is not that they are breaking the law as we understand - it's that laws have been passed which make it effectively impossible to live when you're homeless.

This all comes back to how we, as a society understand what crime is. Criminalization is a choice. It is a choice to see shoplifting from a massive corporation as the same as shoplifting from a locally owned business as the same as stealing money from someone's wallet, even though, intuitively, the harm from each is quite different. It is a choice to do things like making sleeping in your car or camping on public property or panhandling illegal, which many places do specifically because it gives them an excuse to deal with the homeless problem - not by helping the homeless, but by making them disappear from view.

It is a choice to treat crime as a matter of personal responsibility rather than a matter of social policy; a choice to ask "how do we punish criminals" rather than "what are the root causes of these actions and how can create a society where fewer people feel a desire to steal". The former is more cathartic and individualized, but it's the latter tends to really move the needle on crime. Look at the 90s crime wave - the cause of that wasn't just that people across the country spontaneously became more violent and untrustworthy... It was that leaded gasoline had poisoned an entire generation of children. Once that stopped, so did the crime wave.

Thinking in terms of individuals is fine on an individual level. But when talking about public policy, our scope changes. We can't make public policy for individuals; we have to make it for populations. Individually, people make bad, harmful choices. Demographically, we can zoom out and see that a lot of these things have deeper roots, and that we can make much more progress on improving society by tackling those roots. "Tough Love" tends to do the former and ignore the latter. From my experience, most people struggling in life don't need harsh lessons, they need help.

As stated previously, I respect your understanding and how you convey it... But I don't think you're quite understanding the core of what I'm talking about. It's all about zooming out from the individual level and trying to dig a step deeper. Does imprisoning more shoplifters make things better? Is it worth the moral and financial cost? I don't think it does, even if it's more cathartic to be able to say "these are the bad people and we shouldn't protect them".

@CadyRocks writes:

"But back to the unhoused. I'm not saying they all go steal stuff, I'm saying that being homeless is, in and of itself, effectively a crime in many places."

Effectively? Please cite any constitutional city ordinance or state or federal statute or regulation that makes homelessness, per se, or "unhousedness" if you prefer, an actual crime.

We live in a world where simple, clear statements are often met with responses citing "experts from afar." But too often there is actually a valid difference of opinion (at best), and "experts" are used to muddy the waters and cling, no doubt in good faith, to an opinion about the world.

Stealing hundreds of dollars at a crack is hardly "petty." Period. No expert will convince me otherwise.

We are like a frog being slowly boiled, to use the almost-too-common metaphor. Slowly we are being led to believe that a 900-dollar-theft is "understandable" or is "no big deal." But it is. A big deal, that is. Indeed, such a theft, repeated often by the thief or by other thieves, can hurt even a strong establishment.

Nor does stealing 900 dollars at a crack seem necessary to survive on the street, if survival is the goal.

When I was a kid my parents were very young and pretty poor. My dad didn't steal to improve our lot. We learned instead to honestly strive and live inexpensively. He worked three jobs. Not wonderful jobs. Not the jobs of his "passion." Just jobs. And my mom kept house and worked, as well. Over the years things slowly, slowly improved. I hope I inherited even half of their grit and character.

Anybody can be hit with bad luck, and ending up on the street can happen to nearly anybody. It's no shame.

But this isn't really about homelessness. As I said, I do not believe that most crimes are perpetrated by the homeless. They seem to be used more as a conversational distraction.

If somebody stole 50 bucks worth of food to live for a few days on the street, I'd first wonder: "why not instead take advantage of the shelters, other programs or churches that exist in most places in America?" But I would, in any event, certainly have sympathy and would not favor prison. Especially if the thief was new to the streets and hadn't yet figured out what safety nets exist, if any (it can differ by location, no doubt).

But much theft has nothing to do with homelessness. And walking out with nearly a thousand dollars of somebody else's property, unearned, is simply a crime, and not a small one.

But wait, what if the victim is a big company? Surely big companies deserve no sympathy, right?

Wrong. Thinking big companies are inherently evil or beyond sympathy is one of the most pervasive and mistaken notions afoot in the West today. It is a sad fashion.

A "company" consists of and helps people. Real people. And a big company simply consists of and helps more of them.

There are employees, whose wages and salaries come from what's left AFTER the expenses from theft. And there are shareholders, who are not at all always "fat cats" with treasure troves, but are instead, for example, pension funds that have invested the retirement savings of ordinary, hard working men and women. And there are customers, who want and often need what the company provides. And what they pay is not helped by others taking dishonestly what the customers pay for honestly.

But what about insurance? Doesn't that make it okay? Nope. It doesn't make it okay. Insurance doesn't fall from the trees: it is purchased. And as losses increase insurance rates tend to go up. And if it gets bad enough, rates could become prohibitive or insurance can even become unavailable. And even so, guess who works for and invests in insurance companies? Again, real people.

I don't mean to state the obvious to others who are just as obviously intelligent. I'm not at all trying to condescend. I do not feel superior.

But I am troubled to see our society slowly talking itself into cultural norms and ideas that don't seem at all to be helping. I ask again: do things feel better now than they did, say, five years ago? Really?

Polls seem to show that many people are growing unhappy and more worried. I don't sense that society has somehow become more enlightened and effective.

@Noflaps said in #69:
> @CadyRocks writes:
>
> "But back to the unhoused. I'm not saying they all go steal stuff, I'm saying that being homeless is, in and of itself, effectively a crime in many places."
>
> Effectively? Please cite any constitutional city ordinance or state or federal statute or regulation that makes homelessness, per se, or "unhousedness" if you prefer, an actual crime.

You won't find it. Instead, you'll find a patchwork of laws against loitering, against camping on public land, against sleeping in your car, against panhandling, against donating food to people, and more. And, of course, the constant reality of violence from the police, whether or not any laws are actually broken. The end effect of this is that merely living while homeless becomes more and more difficult, and you end up at higher risk of criminal conviction just for doing what you need to survive. To be very loud and clear, I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT THEFT.

I am not claiming that the homeless are responsible for a disproportionate amount of theft. I am trying to provide an example of how what we see as "criminal" is socially constructed. Have you given that Yale Law Article a look?

> We are like a frog being slowly boiled, to use the almost-too-common metaphor.

Hey, can we pause for a moment and remember that this ordinance was a ballot initiative, passed a decade ago by the voters of California, and that $900 is less than half of what it takes to get past the "petty theft" threshold in Texas? Assuming your concerns are taken in good faith, they are *badly* misguided. If you want results, you're best served pushing for changes in the law in Texas or Wisconsin, not acting like we're descending into the purge because of a fairly uncontroversial law from 10 years ago. The frog is in a cauldron being heated by an LED light.

> Slowly we are being led to believe that a 900-dollar-theft is "understandable" or is "no big deal."

This just isn't remotely true. If this is your takeaway from this discussion, you've badly misunderstood me. If this is your takeaway from California Proposition 47, you've been badly misinformed and would do well to read the law you're talking about, and compare it to similar laws from other states. The nice thing about those experts you besmirch is that they rarely make stupid, obvious mistakes.

> If somebody stole 50 bucks worth of food to live for a few days on the street, I'd first wonder: "why not instead take advantage of the shelters, other programs or churches that exist in most places in America?"

Okay, before I get into this - do you care that there are actually answers to this question? Like, there are actually a lot of reasons why people aren't helped by those programs, and if you're not interested in looking, I can gladly pull up some information for you, and even ask friends of mine who have been homeless. This shoddy patchwork of aid is nowhere near as extensive or helpful as you think it is. But if you don't care, I won't bother.

> But I am troubled to see our society slowly talking itself into cultural norms and ideas that don't seem at all to be helping. I ask again: do things feel better now than they did, say, five years ago? Really?

What, you mean before a massive pandemic killed over a million people and a substantial portion of Americans decided to pretend that nothing was wrong and the pandemic was a hoax? Before the supreme court was shown to be completely corrupt and political, and before it stripped women of the right to control over their own bodies? Before a significant portion of congress took part in an attempt to overthrow an election?

There is *so* much wrong with America today, and yeah, things *have* gotten worse in the last 5 years. By all accounts, 2020 was one of the worst years on record for human civilization in general. But if you believe that the problem is that we've gotten too soft on crime... that isn't something that actually happened. It's like arguing that the reason things are so bad is because we abolished the police - another thing that didn't happen, despite claims to the contrary. The law that you see as emblematic of how wrong everything is was passed in 2014, and the part of it you're fixated on is middle-of-the-road at best.

(I'm not touching your take on corporations with a 10-foot pole. In the age of greedflation, acting like shoplifting is the main thing driving prices up is, at best, hopelessly naive. Acting like the main threat to workers is shoplifting when wage theft consistently blows all other theft out of the water is downright insulting. You do not know anything about modern corporations, how they function, or the economics driving them, and I'm not going to be the one to explain it to you.)